Walter Myers - Fallen Angels

“Keep pressure on the wound!”

“It’s not helping! It’s too open!”

“Just keep the pressure.”

“Too many places, we got to try to keep putting it in.”

“Okay! Okay! You keep looking! How’s the other one?”

The boots scraped against my shoulder as they shifted position.

“Looks like shock, maybe a concussion.”

“He breathing?”

A face over mine, lifting my neck, a mouth over mine blowing air into me. I was a balloon, the air pushed into my chest. I gasped.

“He’s breathing!” “Watch him!”

“See if the legs are swelling.”

As they started probing my legs, I turned to see Brew again. There were tubes. A medic had what looked like the thing you use to take baby bottles out of hot water. He kept moving it toward Brew’s stomach.

The breathing was terrible. Brew’s breathing, sucking air. I looked at his face. He wasn’t moving. His mouth was closed. Where was the breathing coming from?

The helicopter’s engines whined. The medic bent over Brew.

“I got nothing, man! I got nothing.”

“Okay! That’s it!”

The medic turned to me quickly. He started wiping my face. The corners of my mouth.

“How you doing, big guy?”

I nodded.

“You play basketball?”

Beyond the medic’s shoulder I could see them covering Brew.

The medic was checking the bag above me. I tried to move so I could see what they were doing with Brew. The medic saw me. He moved into my line of vision.

“You gonna be okay,” he said. “You just got a little concussion, a little steel, a little dirt, the whole thing.”

I heard the zipper. I didn’t have to see it. I heard the zipper. The medic took my hand. He squeezed it. Then he took the other one and squeezed that one. Then he started on my legs.

“Perry! Perry!”

The voice came to me from a long way away. “Come on, Perry, wake up, man!”

I opened my eyes. A tall, dark-skinned brother with shades was standing over me. My mouth was dry. I tried to look around. There was a banner on the wall. It read “That Others May Live.”

“Where am I?”

“In good hands, my man,” the guy said. “You got to pee now.”

“Pee?”

“Yeah, that’s the routine. You wake up, and we got to bring the thing around so you can get rid of some of the fluids, dig it? Just relax, and I’ll take care of it for you.”

I started to say something about peeing for myself but then I saw that both of my arms were bandaged. The guy pulled back the sheets and held me while I tried to urinate. At first I couldn’t, then I managed a little.

“What happened?”

“When you remember from?”

“I was just inside the wood line …” I said.

“I don’t know about that part,” the brother said. “All I know is that you lucky in a way, and you ain’t lucky in a way. You lucky cause you ain’t hurt that bad. Then you ain’t lucky because you ain’t hurt bad enough to go back to the World.”

“Where d I get hit?”

“You had titi shrapnel in your side, in your left leg, and a few splinters in your groin. No big thing. You had a bullet wound on your wrist but that just did barely chip your wrist. And you had a concussion. If anything will get you back to the World, it’s the concussion. Get what I mean?”

He left.

The right hand was bandaged, and the left hand — which I thought was bandaged — just had an IV stuck in it. Some guys in bathrobes saw me awake and came over.

“How you doing?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Yeah, just take it easy,” one guy said; he had sergeant’s stripes on his bathrobe. “Where you coming from?”

“I don’t know, the valley west of Tam Ky, I think.”

“They catching hell up there. They say charlie riding hogs up around Quang Tri.”

“Hogs?”

“Tanks, man.”

“Really?”

“Where the hell are the tanks coming from?”

“From the north through Cambodia, is the word,” he said. “Things are definitely getting heavy.”

I thought about the rumors of peace by the end of the holidays. I made myself hope that peace was still on the way.

The medical facility was like heaven. We got to eat good, we went to movies, the day room was cool. Best of all, the doctor said that none of my wounds were bad.

“You had a bad bruise of your breastbone.” The guy’s name tag read “Haveson.” He smiled as he talked, like he enjoyed being a doctor. “Could have been hit by something or could have been just the blast. You were lucky.”

Lucky.

They had a recording of a bugle that played in the morning. Everybody was shined and sharp. I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t until I saw the personnel around the hospital. They even had GIs tending to flowers around some of the barracks and some doing the same kinds of details they would have been doing back in Devens or any stateside base. In the mess hall they had Vietnamese doing KP.

The ward was full of guys. Some were bandaged nearly from head to feet. Some had big lumps of bandage and tape where limbs used to be.

One guy was on a kind of spit. He had been burned really bad, and they came in and turned him every two hours.

Another guy, his name was Joe Derby, asked me to read to him. He wore dark glasses. There were scars, bad scars on his body. He had some books and asked me to read anything I found interesting. The books were cool. I had read one of them, Platero and I, in high school. The other books were by T. S. Eliot and Steinbeck.

“Your folks send you these books?” I asked.

“My mom,” he said. “I think she has ambition for me.”

“What happened to you?”

“We were in a convoy going to Dak To from Kon-tum. A couple of trucks up front got hit with mines. They set them off from the side of the road. We stopped and then we got hit with even, thing at the same time. I was trying to get behind a truck when it was hit by a mortar.”

“Oh.”

“I remember going up, but I don’t remember coming down.”

“Where you from?”

“Las Vegas.”

I didn’t ask him about his eyes. I didn’t want to know. I read to him from the Jiminez, a small story about what a village looked like on a Sunday morning when everyone had gone to a bullfight. It was a simple story, and it gave you a sense of the author being at peace with the world. Once, when I looked up, I saw that he was crying. I kept on reading.

I wrote Mama a letter. I tried to make it funny I told her that I had been hit in the leg and the wrist and now I was laying up getting fat. I told her that getting fat was my biggest problem.

I thought of writing her a real letter, but I didn’t have anything on my mind that I wanted her to know. I didn’t want to say how afraid of dying I had been. I didn’t want to say that I had a feeling that I wouldn’t get back home.

Brew. I thought about Brew a lot I felt so sorry for him. I remembered laying on the chopper next to him. I remembered feeling his hand. I wondered if he had felt mine. I thought about his praying and had to push him from my mind.

They moved me from one room in the hospital to a recovery ward. In the new ward there were a lot of guys playing cards, playing dominoes. A spec four asked me if I wanted to play poker. I shook my head no.

“He a boonies rat,” a guy said. “You know they ain’t right for two or three weeks.”

“Yeah?” The spec four looked me up and down. “Maybe he can play later.”

On the way to the PX an officer stopped me and asked me why I was out of uniform. The uniform he wore had creases ironed into the shirt. Everything about him was polish and crease. He wanted to know what outfit I was with, and — when he found out I was in the hospital — how long I had been there. He was challenging me, daring me to say something wrong. When he told me I could go on to the PX, I turned around and started back to the hospital. He said he thought I was going to the PX. I told him I had lost my appetite.